The Big Clock (1948)

Peter's movie, but Nora made a superb meatloaf with roasted veggies. Peter made his signature gluten-free brownies for dessert.

Robert M. Ryley on the life of poet and novelist Kenneth Fearing:

Consolation, however, came almost immediately at Yaddo, where he met Nan Lurie, a handsome thirty-two-year-old artist. She had grown up speaking Yiddish in New Jersey, gone to Paris on her own after high school, and won a scholarship to study under Yasuo Kunioshi at the Art Students League. She and Fearing met within a week of their arrival at Yaddo and stayed on together during the winter after most of the other residents had left. On Christmas day, with less than a dollar between them, they ate their first meal alone together at a restaurant in the Black district of Saratoga Springs. By the spring, when they were both back in NewYork, Fearing was wildly, deliriously, giddily in love and writing notes and letters of astonishing sentimentality, even falling into such clichés as "I am not good enough for you." He cherished what he called Nan's "sheer lunacy"--her "vitamins," her "stray cats," her "religious quarter hour," the "confessions" she wrote in the dark, blindfolded. (In his poem "Irene Has a Mind of Her Own," published four years later when his ardor had cooled, he looked on similar flakiness with a less benevolent eye.) In the winter of 1944-45, he moved into Nan's loft on East 10th Street, and, his divorce having become final the year before, they were married in Greenwich, Connecticut, on June 18, 1945.

While still at Yaddo in March 1943, Fearing had been having trouble mapping out a new novel. Inspiration had to wait for two events: the sensational murder in October 1943 of the New York heiress Mrs. Wayne Lonergan, and the publication in 1944 of Samuel Michael Fuller's little-known thriller The Dark Page. Transformed and refined, details from the Lonergan case and Fuller's novel would coalesce in Fearing's imagination to produce the plot of his most famous book, which he wrote between August 1944 and October 1945.

Published in the fall of 1946, The Big Clock made Fearing temporarily rich. Altogether he took in about $60,000 (roughly $360,000 in 1992 dollars): about $ 10,000 in royalties and from the sale of republication rights (including a condensation in The American Magazine), and $50,000 from the sale of film rights to Paramount. In 1947, Nan won $2,000 in an art competition, a sum they dismissed as negligible but that only two years earlier would have seemed a fortune. But Fearing's successes always contained the germ of disaster. Overestimating his business acumen, he had negotiated his own contract with Paramount, permanently and irrevocably signing away his film rights, and relinquishing his television rights till 1952, by which time, he discovered to his rage and frustration, Paramount was showing late-night reruns and had thus cornered the market.